1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates, generally, to a method of manufacturing silicon nanowires using a porous glass template and a device including silicon nanowires formed using the same. More particularly, the present invention relates to a method of manufacturing silicon nanowires formed and grown through a solid-liquid-solid (“SLS”) process or a vapor-liquid-solid (“VLS”) process using a porous glass template having nanopores doped with erbium or an erbium precursor, and a device with increased structural efficiency having silicon nanowires formed using the above method.
2. Description of the Related Art
In general, nanowires are linear material having a diameter on the nanometer scale (e.g., 1 nm=10−9 m) and a length much larger than the diameter, for example, on the hundreds of nanometer, micrometer (1 μm=10−6 m), or millimeter (1 mm=10−3 m) scale. The properties of such nanowires depend on the diameter and length thereof.
Nanowires may be variously applied to minute devices due to their small size, and are advantageous because they exhibit optical properties of polarization or electron shift in a predetermined direction.
Presently, research into methods of preparing nanoparticles and into properties of the nanoparticles is being actively conducted. However, general methods of manufacturing nanowires are not yet well developed. Such methods for manufacturing nanowires typically include chemical vapor deposition (“CVD”), laser ablation and a template process.
According to the template process pores having a diameter ranging from one nanometer to hundreds of nanometers are formed, and such a pore is used as a nanowire template. The template process includes oxidizing an aluminum electrode to form aluminum oxide on the surface thereof, electrochemically etching the aluminum oxide to form nanopores, dipping the electrode into a solution containing metal ions, applying voltage to stack the metal ions on the aluminum electrode through pores so that the pores are filled with the metal ions, and then removing the oxide using an appropriate process, thus obtaining only the metal ions which filled the pores. Those stacked metal ions are metal nanowires.
However, such a conventional method of manufacturing nanowires is disadvantageous because the process is considerably complicated and requires a long period of time, and is thus unsuitable for mass production. Further, such methods make it impossible to form nanowires having excellent linearity and arrangement.
Silicon, having an indirect band gap, is generally difficult to use as optical material. However, an electrooptic technique using silicon at room temperature may be realized through a combination of a nano-device, capable of having a quantum effect, and a doping technique using luminescent material. To this end, the development of a doping technique enabling efficient luminescence and a manufacturing technique able to decrease the size of the device to the nanoscale is required.
Since erbium (Er) has an emission peak at 1.54 μm, resulting in a minimum loss in the wavelength ranges used for optical communication, it is receiving attention as a material for use in silicon-based electrooptic devices. Moreover, the potential luminous properties of such a device may be greatly improved by the energy from the excitons of silicon nanowires or silicon nanocrystals.
With regard to the method of manufacturing a photonic device using erbium, a method of manufacturing a silicon-based photonic device by doping silicon nanowires formed on a silicon substrate with erbium has been disclosed in Korean Patent Laid-open Publication No. 2005-103023. However, the above patent publication suffers because this method can be applied only to photoluminescent devices.
In addition, a method of manufacturing a nano-dot array is disclosed in Korean Patent Laid-open Publication No. 2003-056328. The disclosed method includes forming an etching mask on a silicon film doped with erbium using a template having holes and then etching the exposed film portion to remove it. However, this method is limited because it forms nanowires via an etching process, rather than a growing process.